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Turn Bluetooth On and Off from Command Line on macOS

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bluetooth

Bluetooth has been a revelation in wireless technology: wireless mice, headphones, streaming devices, and a variety of home and office environments.  It goes without saying that wireless peripherals are so much easier to manage than wired counterparts, especially mice, that I usually have my MacBook's bluetooth turned on.

There are times, however, that I move my laptop away from the mouse (OK, I admit:  the kitchen) where the bluetooth connection is still in range but with the mouse still connected, I can't use my laptop's touchpad, leaving me to only use my keyboard which is an annoyance.  That led me to finding blueutil, a command line utility for macOS that lets me turn Bluetooth on and off with one command!

Start by installing blueutil with HomeBrew:

brew install blueutil

The -p flag is a switch for turning bluetooth on and off:

# Turn bluetooth off
blueutil -p 0

# Turn bluetooth on
blueutil -p 1

This utility will be so helpful as I move around my house.  Since I can't use my touchpad during these situations, I can't turn Bluetooth off from the command bar, so a simple command like this is exactly what I need!

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Discussion

  1. Patrick K

    Thanks for sharing this! I was trying to find an easier way to toggle Bluetooth and I kept finding articles about AppleScript, but this is way easier for people familiar with the command line.

  2. Ahmed Hossein

    Thank you! I just came across this and it was a life-saver.

    I created a small “bluetoggle.sh” to toggle the switch: ON if it was OFF, OFF if it was ON. I then used iCanHazShortcut to map the script to [^B] for ease of access.

    #!/bin/zsh

if [ blueutil -p |grep 1 = "1" 2>/dev/null 2>/dev/null ]; then blueutil -p 0; else blueutil -p 1; fi
  3. Ahmed Hossein

    The code above was messed up by the interpreter (symbol ` is not accepted it seems). I put here the final code of my 1-line bluetoggle.sh

    https://pastebin.com/YssdgD5Z

  4. Ahmed Hossein

    This can be turned into a toggle command using:

    #!/bin/bash
blueutil -p | grep 1 && blueutil -p 0 || blueutil -p 1
  5. Sean Beeg

    Thanks for this. Bluetooth has been crashing on my mac every so often, so a quick brew install and 2 aliases and I’m in business.

  6. Matt D

    Here is how I control my bluetooth from ZSH.

    bt () {
	if [ -n $1 ]
	then
		echo $1
		export btArg=$(echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]') 
		echo $btArg
		case $btArg in
			(on) echo "Turning on BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
				blueutil --power 1 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
			(off) echo "Turning off BlueTooth" >> /tmp/bt.log
				blueutil --power 0 | tee /tmp/bt.log ;;
			(stat*) echo "Checking BlueTooth state" >> /tmp/bt.log
				export BT=$(blueutil -p | tee /tmp/bt.log) 
				case $BT in
					(0) echo "BlueTooth is powered off"
						blueutil --connected ;;
					(1) echo "BlueTooth is powered on"
						blueutil --connected ;;
					(*) echo "BlueTooth in unknown state"
						blueutil --connected ;;
				esac ;;
			(*) echo -n "Unknown input" ;;
		esac
	else
		echo -n "Need input"
	fi
}

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